From Ben: “I incorporate work with dreams into my therapy to whatever degree the client wants to. My experience is that using dreams dramatically increases the healing power of the work we do. Clients who engage in dreamwork have progressed significantly quicker than ones who do not. Even using one dream can provide the path for huge insight and changes. I have found that the dreams always take clients right to the place where their deepest issues sit and allows them to step right to that edge with a tremendous amount of internal support. It opens up the surface of therapeutic work in every way, regardless of age. I literally work with folks from the age six to sixty.

“Through the twenty years since I stepped into my first Dreamwork session with Marc Bregman the dreams have proven themselves again and again to reveal what it is I cannot see and the path to what I need to feel and act on in order to heal. I can still remember vividly a dream I had when I was six, of a huge blimp that brought me a feeling of terror that I was not able to feel in my waking life. That six year-old me instead was frozen in a place of not feeling, paralyzed by anxiety and depression and unable to get support; my father a terrifying presence and my mom emotionally controlling and shut down. The dream I arrived with to my first session at Marc’s office in 1995 was one where a man stood on a roof across the street, with lightening coming down onto him. Again, I was paralyzed with fear, but my mind able to say, ‘Of course I am going to stay away from the danger that is there.’ But I have learned over the years again and again in different ways that the lightening is potency and the man is not my scary dad, but is the Animus, the male principle in me who can support me in feeling the potency and all the fear, pain, and excitement that comes with it.

“In my current work, the Animus appears as a basketball coach. I am trying to advocate for one of my teen clients, that the coach should give him a shot. Working the dream, I get to feel how I am the teen, I can feel his loving support. With the dream, I get to see and feel how I am still dodging the vulnerability of letting in the male nurturance.“

Ben Newman is a Licensed Independent Clinical Social Worker (LICSW) in Vermont. After receiving his MSW from the Hunter College School of Social in New York City in 2004, he spent a decade as the Clinical Director for a small, private school in Vermont. He has been in private practice for fifteen years. He offers Archetypal Dreamwork Therapy under the supervision of Marc Bregman.

Ben lives and practices in Montpelier, Vermont. He is available to work with anyone in the world through HIPPA-complaint video sessions and phone calls.